More than one way to read a film

Peter Bradshaw is a fine film critic, but he has failed to understand Stephen Daldry's adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's masterpiece, The Reader (Film&Music, 2 January). He argues the film presents Hannah Schmitz - a concentration camp guard and war criminal - as having a "guilt-free human vulnerability". True Hannah is presented as vulnerable; but it is no part of the film's authorial vision that she is free of guilt. The film's point, I think, lies in demonstrating that vulnerability can play a part in leading one - anyone, perhaps - to commit acts of barely comprehensible wickedness.

The affair between Hannah and Michael is not "glorious"; though sexually fulfilling, it is troubled and hints at disaster from the off. When Hannah silences the judge with "What would you have done?", the judge is not silenced by her moral honesty, but is rendered speechless by horror. (Hannah's question ends cross-examination in which she fails to see she had a moral responsibility to save 300 people locked inside a burning church.) Finally, it was, indeed, toe-curling to see Michael attempt to carry out Hannah's wish that her money be given to Ilana, one of her victims. But this was precisely the effect that this scene was designed to elicit: to the very end Hannah has failed to appreciate the nature of her crime and Michael, in fulfilling what he takes to be his duty to her, has failed to see this too.

Hannah, though guilty of an appalling crime, is a rounded, vulnerable character; perhaps this has spooked Bradshaw. But unless we accept that people who commit atrocities have stories too, we will fail to understand how such atrocities can be committed in the first place.Professor Julian DoddUniversity of Manchester